7 ways to Speed up your Site for Better Ranking & Conversion
If you want to Improve your Rankings & Convert more Visitors then you need a Faster Site.
If you own or manage a website or blog, it is very important to look for an effective way to increase your page speed.
This increased page speed, in turn, enables you to improve user experience, increase the rate of conversions and help you improve your organic search engine rankings.
The rapid evolution of technology products has made it very much easier for people to improve the performance of their websites with plugin, frameworks, media content, scripts and so on.
It is very important that your website has a user experience metric that will make sure that most of your visitors are not leaving your website before it has even loaded in the browser.
Speeding up your website is one of the most important aspects involved in a website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Therefore, it can also be used to improve your websites’ conversion rate. Although the result might not be noticeable right away, the rankings will gradually start to improve over time.
The speed optimization of a website is the method that is used to improve the speed in which a web page loads.
The speed of a website has a great impact on the user experience, organic site traffic, Search Engine rankings, and total website conversion rates. This is why it is a very vital aspect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
The main reason why the speed of a website can improve search engine rankings and conversion rates is because of the fact that users and search engines find faster websites more appealing than a slower website and they quickly lose interest in them.
Internet users all over the world are more interested in web pages that load fast and if they encounter a web page that loads slowly many of them will leave the website.
Based on recent research by Google, it was discovered that;
- About 32% of web users leave a website if the website takes between 1-3 seconds to load.
- About 90% of web users leave a website if the website takes between 1-5 seconds to load.
- About 106% of web users leave a website if the website takes between 1-6 seconds to load.
- About 123% of web users leave a website if the website takes between 1-10 seconds to load.
Search engines like Google also prefer a website that is fast to load and this is why most of them often consider the speed of a website when ranking them for Search Engine Result Page (SERP).
The main reason why search engines prefer faster loading websites is that their main goal is to provide a great experience for their users.
So if you want your website to have a great search engine ranking, it is very important to improve the speed of your website.
Most of the search engines available including Google prefer a website that has a load speed of about 3 seconds or lower. It is also very important that you consider the speed of your competitors’ website to understand how fast you need to make your website load.
The methods that are often used to speed up a website to improve search engine rankings and get better conversion rate include;
1. Optimize Images
The speed optimization of a website can be done by optimizing the website images(that is, try to reduce the size as much as you can while ensuring that it does not lose too much quality.
There are many methods that can be used to optimize the image for websites. One of these methods is the use of optimal image format for each image type.
That is, you can use the JPG format for images like photographs but it is important that you still remove unnecessary image EXIF metadata like camera and geo-information.
You should also try compressing a small amount of the JPG file. For instance, you can compress the file by 80% and move downward if you also intend to reduce the quality of the image.
However, vector-based images like icons, logos and illustrations should be uploaded in PNG or SVG formats.
It is also best to remove the unnecessary XML markup in SVG images.
The second methods involve using optimal image size for each responsive breakpoint. This is done in order to prevent users with small screens from downloading unnecessarily large images.
2. Enable Website Caching for Lightning fast Page Loading
Website caching is often used to pre-compute PHP code & temporarily store data for a web page for when a visitor requests a site.
By saving the data instead of reloading it every time the person visits the site, you will be able to enhance the speed of your website.
Website caching can be enabled through manual coding, general settings or use of a plugin like W3 Total Cache in WordPress.
3. Audit your Plugins
Even though plugins in WordPress can be used to add additional functionality to your website and reduce the cost of development, they are also capable of reducing the speed of your website.
Low-quality plugins and plugins that perform complex tasks are often one of the reasons for the reduced speed of websites.
This is why it is very important to perform a regular audit of your plugins in order to ensure that your plugins are of high quality.
4. Minify, aggregate & supercharge your code
Generally, the longer the code and files that are on a webpage, the longer it will take for the page to load. This is why it is very important to minimize the amount of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on your website in order to increase the speed of the website.
You can also consider using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) to increase the speed of your website. AMP is developed and designed to minify & provide barebones HTML and CSS in order to increase the speed of your website.
These AMPs can be used to eliminate unnecessary spaces and characters in the code, leading to a reduction in the size of files and processes on the web page.
This will lead to an increase in the speed of the website.
You can also try re-examining your code to minimize the number of files and processes on your webpages.
5. Get better & faster web hosting
There are a lot of web hosting services available and they often differ in price and quality.
It is however very important that you look for a web hosting with high-quality servers because these can increase the speed of your website. Low-quality servers tend to take longer to load.
It is also best to upgrade to Virtual Private Server (VPS) instead of shared hosting.
6. File Compression & G-zip
Another method that can be used to increase the speed of a website is file compression.
When the files for your website have small sizes, they will be faster to load.
This is why it is important to compress your files before putting them on your website.
You can also leverage gzip compression, so the server zips and compresses your files into a Gzip file and serves that to your visitors.
7. Reduce number of HTTP requests & redirects
Generally, redirects are often used to guide users to live pages when content has been removed or moved from the website, but if your website has too many redirects, it will reduce the speed of your website.
This is mainly because redirects often need additional HTTP requests which can reduce the speed of your website.
This is why it is very important that you reduce the number of redirect links on your website for speed optimization.
Concluding
Now using these techniques you should be able to boost the speed of your website, in turn increasing your website ranking & conversions from visitors! if you still need help, feel free to reach out to us for more information & insight.